Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “HTC Vive Pro Eye hands-on: first VR headset with eye tracking”.
Hey it’s Nick Statt with The Verge and we’re here at HTC’s CES press conference checking out all of its Vive virtual reality. News.. Now they had a new headset to announce.. It’S called the Vive Pro Eye..
It’S got native built-in eye-tracking.. Now that may sound kinda lame.. I mean eye-tracking’s been kicking around the PC gaming space for a while, but in virtual reality it can be really really huge, actually both for A accessibility for people who can’t use their hands but also B for what’s called foveated rendering..
Now, that’s a technique that, let’s you increase the resolution of an image by decreasing the resolution of those images on the peripheral vision of whoever’s using the VR headset.. That way when you’re looking closely at something it actually increases. The resolution of that virtual image.
HTC actually has a whole different idea for the Vive Pro Eye.. They imagine it would be really big for business use cases, so enterprise customers, who wan na make specific apps that take advantage of eye-tracking.. So we get to try a few of those here at their press conference.. The first one did not use foveated rendering, but it did make use of eye-tracking.. It was a motivational speaking or kind of a public speaking demo called Ovation that tracked how you used your eyes. While you were giving a speech in front of a big crowd., So they did things like tracking how fast you were talking, how slow you were talking where you were looking at. While you were speaking whether you were looking right at the teleprompter or whether you were making eye contact with equal sides of the left and the right side of the room, and then afterwards, it gives you this big breakdown, telling you how you were doing where you Can improve and a headset like the Vive Pro Eye, really makes something like this possible.
Without eye-tracking. You couldn’t really make a virtual reality app like this.. It wouldn’t really make sense’cause the data, just wouldn’t be there. So another cool demo.
We tried out here called Zero Light specifically showed off the foveated rendering capabilities of the Vive Pro Eye.. So it was a showroom, app essentially., So you put on the Vive Pro and you start selecting options for a car that you wan na, maybe buy potentially in the future. Once you’re, actually in the car and you’re up close and personal with the steering wheel, the Speedometer the radio things like that, the foveated rendering really comes into clear picture., So they did a side-by-side comparison in real time. While I was wearing the headset.
So on the left, it was standard and on the right it had foveated rendering enabled, and it was a huge night and day difference.. I could actually read the text I was seeing.. I could clearly look at icons and the gear shift.. I could read the speedometer things like that, whereas on the left in the standard version, it was all fuzzy. It kind of looked like. I wasn’t wearing my glasses..
As for how well the eye-tracking works. Well, it worked pretty seamlessly. You’re, not really supposed to think about it, while you’re doing it.
You’re just supposed to move your vision around and usually there’s some sort of visual input like a laser pointer or a kind of like a heat map telling you where you’re Looking. We had that in our demos here and it seemed to work pretty flawlessly and I could see how this could be a really huge feature for VR., Not just VR games, but also these business apps. Other things like that: educational apps for sure.. In terms of how the eye-tracking actually functions well, they put these rings inside of the goggles on the Vive, Pro., So they’re on the outer rim, and you can see them pretty clearly when you’re putting the goggles on., You don’t really feel them, while you’re wearing the Headset., The comfort level is the same.. It feels just like the old Vive Pro that came out last year here at CES, and basically it just tracks where your retinas are moving as you’re looking through a scene using little pulses of light.. They also haven’t said anything about pricing or availability beyond the fact that it’s coming in the second quarter of this year.. So it is coming soon, but we just don’t know how much it’s gon na cost..
That said, if you wan na, find out more information about the Vive Pro Eye or any of the other cool products here at CES, keep it locked to The Verge on YouTube at youtube.com/theverge. .